A sense of justice
At the beginning of July I was honoured to attend a powerful exhibition in parliament on the appalling Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence.
The exhibition, organised by UNGRIPP (United Group for the Reform of IPP), told the stories of IPP prisoners, their families and friends. It was a stark reminder of just how corrosive this terrible sentence, passed at the height of the former Labour government’s ‘tough on crime’ obsession, has become to a sense of justice and the rule of law.
The IPP sentence is specific to the England and Wales criminal justice jurisdiction. Similar sentences also operate in Scotland (the Order of Lifelong Restriction sentence, or OLR) and in Northern Ireland (the Indeterminate Custodial Sentence, or ICS).
A new briefing by us this week – A death row of sorts – shows that similar problems and injustices for prisoners and their families arise from these sentences, whether in Northern Ireland, Scotland, England or Wales. The title of the briefing, for instance, is taken from a comment made by a prisoner in Scotland.
The cumulative effect of these life sentence-like prison sentences – the disappointment and despair, the sense of hopelessness that comes from not knowing when one’s sentence will end, or if it will end – is tortuous for prisoners and their families. We are encouraging as many of our supporters as possible to write to their MPs, asking them to back the attempt by Sir Bob Neill MP to get parliament to bring an end to the IPP once and for all.
We should not, however, forget that the IPP sentence is, at least, no longer available to the courts in England and Wales, since its partial abolition in 2012. The OLR and ICS sentences remain available, and are used, in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
So there remains much to do, across the United Kingdom, to bring an end to these tortuous, life sentence-like sentences.